Tag Archives: hashtags

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has just published an important, must-read report on the use of social media for disaster response. As noted by OCHA, this document was inspired by conversations with my team and I at QCRI. We jointly recognize that innovation in humanitarian technology is not enough. What is needed—and often lacking—is innovation in policymaking. Only then can humanitarian technology have widespread impact. This new think piece by OCHA seeks to catalyze enlightened policymaking.

I was pleased to provide feedback on earlier drafts of this new study and look forward to discussing the report’s recommendations with policymakers across the humanitarian space. In the meantime, many thanks to Roxanne Moore and Andrej Verity for making this report a reality. As Andrej notes in his blog post on this new study, the Filipino Government has just announced that “twitter will become another source of information for the Philippines official emergency response mechanism,” which will lead to an even more pressing Big (Crisis) Data challenge. The use of standardized hashtags will thus be essential.

The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to disaster response as the absence of information. While information scarcity has long characterized our information landscapes, today’s information-scapes are increasingly marked by an overflow of information—Big Data. To this end, encouraging the proactive standardization of hashtags may be one way to reduce this Big Data challenge. Indeed, standardized hashtags—i.e., more structured information—would enable paid emergency responders (as well as affected communities) to “better leverage crowdsourced information for operational planning and response.” At present, the Government of the Philippines seems to be the few actors that actually endorse the use of specific hashtags during major disasters as evidenced by their official crisis hashtags strategy.

The OCHA report thus proposes three hashtag standards and also encourages social media users to geo-tag their content during disasters. The latter can be done by enabling auto-GPS tagging or by using What3Words. Users should of course be informed of data-privacy considerations when geo-tagging their reports. As for the three hashtag standards:

Early standardization of hashtags designating a specific disaster

Standard, non-changing hashtag for reporting non-emergency needs

Standard, non-changing hashtags for reporting emergency needs

1. As the OCHA think piece rightly notes, “News stations have been remarkably successful in encouraging early standardization of hashtags, especially during political events.” OCHA thus proposes that humanitarian organizations take a “similar approach for emergency response reporting and develop partnerships with Twitter as well as weather and news teams to publicly encourage such standardization. Storm cycles that create hurricanes and cyclones are named prior to the storm. For these events, an official hashtag should be released at the same time as the storm announcement.” For other hazards, “emergency response agencies should monitor the popular hashtag identifying a disaster, while trying to encourage a standard name.”

2. OCHA advocates for the use of #iSee, #iReport or #PublicRep for members of the public to designate tweets that refer to non-emergency needs such as “power lines, road closures, destroyed bridges, large-scale housing damage, population displacement or geographic spread (e.g., fire or flood).” When these hashtags are accompanied with GPS information, “responders can more easily identify and verify the information, therefore supporting more timely response & facilitating recovery.” In addition, responders can more easily create live crisis maps on the fly thanks to this structured, geo-tagged information.

3. As for standard hashtags for emergency reports, OCHA notes emergency calls are starting to give way to emergency SMS’s. Indeed, “Cell phone users will soon be able to send an SMS to a toll-free phone number. For emergency reporting, this new technology could dramatically alter the way the public interacts with nation-based emergency response call centers. It does not take a large imaginary leap to see the potential move from SMS emergency calls to social media emergency calls. Hashtags could be one way to begin reporting emergencies through social media.”

Most if not all countries have national emergency phone numbers already. So OCHA suggests using these existing, well-known numbers as the basis for social media hashtags. More specifically, an emergency hashtag would be composed of the country’s emergency number (such as 911 in the US, 999 in the UK, 133 in Austria, etc) followed by the country’s two-letter code (US, UK, AT respectively). In other words: #911US, #999UK, #133AT. Some countries, like Austria, have different emergency phone numbers for different types of emergencies. So these could also be used accordingly. OCHA recognizes that many “federal agencies fear that such a system would result in people reporting through social media outside of designated monitoring times. This is a valid concern. However, as with the implementation of any new technology in the public service, it will take time and extensive promotion to ensure effective use.”

Of course, “no monitoring system will be perfect in terms of low-cost, real-time analysis and high accuracy.” OCHA knows very well that there are a number of important limitations to the system they propose above. To be sure, “significant steps need to be taken to ensure that information flows from the public to response agencies and back to the public through improved efforts.” This is an important theme in my forthcoming book “Digital Humanitarians.”

As noted here, the Filipino Government has had an official strategy on promoting the use of crisis hashtags since 2012. Recently, the Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office (PCDSPO) and the Office of the Presidential Spokesperson (PCDSPO-OPS) have kindly shared their their 7-page strategy (PDF), which I’ve summarized below.

The Filipino government first endorsed the use of the #rescuePH and #reliefPH in August 2012, when the country was experiencing storm-enhanced monsoon rains. These were initiatives from the private sector. Enough people were using the hashtags to make them trend for days. Eventually, we adopted the hashtags in our tweets for disseminating government advisories, and for collecting reports from the ground. We also ventured into creating new hashtags, and into convincing media outlets to use unified hashtags.” For new hashtags, “The convention is the local name of the storm + PH (e.g., #PabloPH, #YolandaPH). In the case of the heavy monsoon, the local name of the monsoon was used, plus the year (i.e., #Habagat2013).” After agreeing on the hashtags, ” the OPS issued an official statement to the media and the public to carry these hashtags when tweeting about weather-related reports.”

The Office of the Presidential Spokesperson (OPS) would then monitor the hashtags and “made databases and lists which would be used in aid of deployed government frontline personnel, or published as public information.” For example, the OPS “created databases from reports from #rescuePH, containing the details of those in need of rescue, which we endorsed to the National Disaster Risk Reduction & Management Council, the Coast Guard, and the Department of Transportation and Communications. Needless to say, we assumed that the databases we created using these hashtags would be contaminated by invalid reports, such as spam & other inappropriate messages. We try to filter out these erroneous or malicious reports, before we make our official endorsements to the concerned agencies. In coordination with officers from the Department of Social Welfare and Development, we also monitored the hashtag #reliefPH in order to identify disaster survivors who need food and non-food supplies.”

During Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), “the unified hashtag #RescuePH was used to convey lists of people needing help.” This information was then sent to to the National Disaster Risk Reduction & Management Council so that these names could be “included in their lists of people/communities to attend to.” This rescue hashtag was also “useful in solving surplus and deficits of goods between relief operations centers.” So the government encouraged social media users to coordinate their #ReliefPH efforts with the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s on-the-ground relief-coordination efforts. The Government also “created an infographic explaining how to use the hashtag #RescuePH.”

Earlier, during the 2012 monsoon rains, the government “retweeted various updates on the rescue and relief operations using the hashtag #SafeNow. The hashtag is used when the user has been rescued or knows someone who has been rescued. This helps those working on rescue to check the list of pending affected persons or families, and update it.”

The government’s strategy document also includes an assessment on their use of unified hashtags during disasters. On the positive side, “These hashtags were successful at the user level in Metro Manila, where Internet use penetration is high. For disasters in the regions, where internet penetration is lower, Twitter was nevertheless useful for inter-sector (media – government – NGOs) coordination and information dissemination.” Another positive was the use of a unified hashtag following the heavy monsoon rains of 2012, “which had damaged national roads, inconvenienced motorists, and posing difficulty for rescue operations. After the floods subsided, the government called on the public to identify and report potholes and cracks on the national highways of Metro Manila by tweeting pictures and details of these to the official Twitter account […] , and by using the hashtag #lubak2normal. The information submitted was entered into a database maintained by the Department of Public Works and Highways for immediate action.”

The hashtag was used “1,007 times within 2 hours after it was launched. The reports were published and locations mapped out, viewable through a page hosted on the PCDSPO website. Considering the feedback, we considered the hashtag a success. We attribute this to two things: one, we used a platform that was convenient for the public to report directly to the government; and two, the hashtag appealed to humor (lubak means potholes or rubble in the vernacular). Furthermore, due to the novelty of it, the media had no qualms helping us spread the word. All the reports we gathered were immediately endorsed […] for roadwork and repair.” This example points to the potential expanded use of social media and crowdsourcing for rapid damage assessments.

On the negative side, the use of #SafeNow resulted mostly in “tweets promoting #safenow, and very few actually indicating that they have been successfully rescued and/or are safe.” The most pressing challenge, however, was filtering. “In succeeding typhoons/instances of flooding, we began to have a filtering problem, especially when high-profile Twitter users (i.e., pop-culture celebrities) began to promote the hashtags through Twitter. The actual tweets that were calls for rescue were being drowned by retweets from fans, resulting in many nonrescue-related tweets […].” This explains the need for Twitter monitoring platforms like AIDR, which is free and open source.

In July 2013, my team and I at QCRI launched this dashboard to analyze hashtags used by Twitter users during crises. Our first case study, which is available here, focused on Hurricane Sandy. Since then, both the UN and Greenpeace have also made use of the dashboard to analyze crisis tweets.

We just uploaded 700,000+ Westgate related tweets to the dashboard. The results are available here and also displayed above. The dashboard is still under development, so we very much welcome feedback on how to improve it for future analysis. You can upload your own tweets to the dashboard if you’d like to test drive the platform.

Update:You can now upload your own tweets to the Crisis Hashtags Analysis Dashboard here.

Hashtag footprints can be revealing. The map below, for example, displays the top 200 locations in the world with the most Twitter hashtags. The top 5 are Sao Paolo, London, Jakarta, Los Angeles and New York.

A recent study (PDF) of 2 billion geo-tagged tweets and 27 million unique hashtags found that “hashtags are essentially a local phenomenon with long-tailed life spans.” The analysis also revealed that hashtags triggered by external events like disasters “spread faster than hashtags that originate purely within the Twitter network itself.” Like other metadata, hashtags can be informative in and of themselves. For example, they can provide early warning signals of social tensions in Egypt, as demonstrated in this study. So might they also reveal interesting patterns during and after major disasters?

Tens of thousands of distinct crisis hashtags were posted to Twitter during Hurricane Sandy. While #Sandy and #hurricane featured most, thousands more were also used. For example: #SandyHelp, #rallyrelief, #NJgas, #NJopen, #NJpower, #staysafe, #sandypets, #restoretheshore, #noschool, #fail, etc. NJpower, for example, “helped keep track of the power situation throughout the state. Users and news outlets used this hashtag to inform residents where power outages were reported and gave areas updates as to when they could expect their power to come back” (1).

My colleagues and I at QCRI are studying crisis hashtags to better understand the variety of tags used during and in the immediate aftermath of major crises. Popular hashtags used during disasters often overshadow more hyperlocal ones making these less discoverable. Other challenges include the: “proliferation of hashtags that do not cross-pollinate and a lack of usability in the tools necessary for managing massive amounts of streaming information for participants who needed it” (2). To address these challenges and analyze crisis hashtags, we’ve just launched a Crisis Hashtags Analytics Dashboard. As displayed below, our first case study is Hurricane Sandy. We’ve uploaded about half-a-million tweets posted between October 27th to November 7th, 2012 to the dashboard.

Users can visualize the frequency of tweets (orange line) and hashtags (green line) over time using different time-steps, ranging from 10 minute to 1 day intervals. They can also “zoom in” to capture more minute changes in the number of hashtags per time interval. (The dramatic drop on October 30th is due to a server crash. So if you have access to tweets posted during those hours, I’d be grateful if you could share them with us).

In the second part of the dashboard (displayed below), users can select any point on the graph to display the top “K” most frequent hashtags. The default value for K is 10 (e.g., top-10 most frequent hashtags) but users can change this by typing in a different number. In addition, the 10 least-frequent hashtags are displayed, as are the 10 “middle-most” hashtags. The top-10 newest hashtags posted during the selected time are also displayed as are the hashtags that have seen the largest increase in frequency. These latter two metrics, “New K” and “Top Increasing K”, may provide early warning signals during disasters. Indeed, the appearance of a new hashtag can reveal a new problem or need while a rapid increase in the frequency of some hashtags can denote the spread of a problem or need.

The third part of the dashboard allows users to visualize and compare the frequency of top hashtags over time. This feature is displayed in the screenshot below. Patterns that arise from diverging or converging hashtags may indicate important developments on the ground.

We’re only at the early stages of developing our hashtags analytics platform (above), but we hope the tool will provide insights during future disasters. For now, we’re simply experimenting and tinkering. So feel free to get in touch if you would like to collaborate and/or suggest some research questions.

Acknowledgements:Many thanks to QCRI colleagues Ahmed Meheina and Sofiane Abbar for their work on developing the dashboard.

Yes, only a small percentage of tweets generated during a disaster are directly relevant and informative for disaster response. No, this doesn’t mean we should dismiss Twitter as a source for timely, disaster-related information. Why? Because our efforts ought to focus on how that small percentage of informative tweets can be increased. What incentives or policies can be put in place? The following tweets by the Filipino government may shed some light.

The above tweet was posted three days before Typhoon Bopha (designated Pablo locally) made landfall in the Philippines. In the tweet below, the government directly and publicly encourages Filipinos to use the #PabloPH hashtag and to follow the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical & Astronomical Services Admin-istration (PAGASA) twitter feed, @dost_pagasa, which has over 400,000 follow-ers and also links to this official Facebook page.

The government’s official Twitter handle (@govph) is also retweeting tweets posted by The Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Plan-ning Office (@PCDCSO). This office is the “chief message-crafting body of the Office of the President.” In one such retweet (below), the office encourages those on Twitter to use different hashtags for different purposes (relief vs rescue). This mimics the use of official emergency numbers for different needs, e.g., police, fire, Ambulance, etc.

Given this kind of enlightened disaster response leadership, one would certainly expect that the quality of tweets received will be higher than without government endorsement. My team and I at QCRI are planning to analyze these tweets to de-termine whether or not this is the case. In the meantime, I expect we’ll see more examples of self-organized disaster response efforts using these hashtags, as per the earlier floods in August, which I blogged about here: Crowdsourcing Crisis Response following the Philippine Floods. This tech-savvy self-organization dynamic is important since the government itself may be unable to follow up on every tweeted request.

I recently posted the following question on the CrisisMappers list-serve: “Does anyone know whether a list of crisis hashtags exists?”

There are several reasons why such a hashtag list would be of added value to the CrisisMappers community and beyond. First, an analysis of Twitter hashtags used during crises over the past few years could be quite insightful; interesting new patterns may be evolving. Second, the resulting analysis could be used as a guide to find (and create) new hashtags when future crises unfold. Third, a library of hashtags would make it easier to collect historical datasets of crisis information shared on Twitter for the purposes of analysis & social computing research. To be sure, without this data, developing more sophisticated machine learning platforms like the Twitter Dashboard for the Humanitarian Cluster System would be serious challenge indeed.

After posting my question on CrisisMappers and Twitter, it was clear that no such library existed. So my colleague Sara Farmer launched a Google Spreadsheet to crowdsource an initial list. Since I was working on a similar list, I’ve created a combined spreadsheet which is available and editable here. Please do add any other crisis hashtags you may know about so we can make this the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource available to everyone. Thank you!

Whilst doing this research, I came across two potentially interesting and helpful hashtag websites: Hashonomy.com and Hashtags.org.